The tightrope between your pocketbook and city needs

No matter who the experts are, the city administration and the city council who hire them must keep their eyes wide open.

Problems in city infrastructure can take a long time to develop and be noticed, but two things are certain: they will develop, and you will pay, sooner or later.

So, while the tendency in local governments is to let the experts do their thing, the people we elect to oversee them have a tough job to do in overriding that tendency and holding accountable those who know more than they do.

The selection in Electric City of a new engineering firm, moving away from one that has decades of institutional knowledge about the city, may or may not be a good thing. Neither is automatic, and that concern may be less important than the most common factors the council will feel pushing and pulling them: balancing needs against their customers’ ability to pay.

The easiest inclination for anyone whose boss is everybody else is to try and please them all, which of course they can’t. But the attempt is often made, charging a bit too cheaply for city services, little by little, year after year, leading to the eventual erosion of the systems the whole city depends on — roads, pipes and pumps.

Then one day the electorate wakes up and wonders why things are breaking down and costing so much.

Guarding the public purse from those who would spend it too easily is essential, but so is a steady insistence on continual, appropriate contributions to that purse from a public that pays its fair and considered share.

That’s the tightrope that city leaders walk — between city needs and your pocketbook.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher